Comment by myself248

I have a number of passively-cooled silent machines, from metal-chassis rugged subnotebooks popular with the military and field-service techs, to plastic cheapies intended for the student market.

They're all fairly low-spec in absolute terms, but even 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC is adequate to run Win10 and office apps, at least, it was before all the Copilot bloat. And you can buy them as an individual, if you search them out explicitly.

But that's not what the mass market buys when they go shopping. Partly because that's not what Best Buy puts on the shelf, and partly because Microsoft sternly warns that such machines aren't recommended for the AI-encumbered future. Gotta push 40 TOPS and have at least 16GB to get Microsoft's blessing, which I think is the single largest driving force behind the hardware upgrade cycle.